When health care services move to the home

Our society faces large demographic changes, where the number of senior citizens in the population increases while, at the same time, the number of younger people participating in the labor force decreases. These changes in demography have large socital effects not least on the part of the health care sector concerned with senior citizens, their relatives, and health care workers.

The health care sector has met these demographic challenges with, e.g., redistribution of services and resources between public institutions and private homes, between health workers, seniors and their relatives, and between technologies and humans. With such redistributions also the responsibility for care becomes transferred from health care institutions to the home and its people and technologies. This leads to alternative and new distributions of health and care workers' work (frame and content) interacting with seniors' home life, and changes to relatives' influence and co-responsibility. 

This research project contributes theoretically and practically to working with care and welfare technology. We aim to build a new understanding of the possibilities that the technology offers for cooperation between humans and technologies in care work. In order to achieve this goal we follow the everyday life of seniors and home care workers, investigate needs and wishes, and study the life cycle of technological services in "smart homes". In addition, we evaluate existing technical solutions in cooperation with their users, and we experiment with designing new solutions -- also in collaborations with their users. Alternative technical solutions can make the basis for suggesting solutions to future home care.